[mech998877]

Robots (and other tools) are capital. A way I think of it:

if you formed a co-op of sorts, with let's say 20 people, starting with no land ownership and hardly any tools, they could try to make a business. Whatever they end up starting would be a fairly low-productivity business- washing windows, janitorial services, lawn service, etc. The more tools and land a co-op has to work with, the more productive they can be. With a few million dollars up-front they could have built a factory instead.

The increased productivity generated can be attributed to the capital share of income.

[stymaar]

That's econ 101. But that doesn't mean that's what happened in the real world.

The thing is you won't be able to name a single industry for which automation has had a significant impact on labor productivity during the 2000-2020.

The US lost almost half of its manufacturing jobs in the 2000s and it has pretty much nothing to do with productivity, and everything to do with businesses moving their production abroad.

Robots can have a huge impact in the coming decades, but you can't argue that they had negligible impact on the past two decades.